Office & Dragons is a legal tech startup focused on eliminating repetitive legal tasks, such as bulk edits to tens, and even thousands, of documents. CEO, Sam Smolkin, talked to Artificial Lawyer about how using genAI has taken the platform to new levels.
First, the company. Smolkin was an associate at Kirkland & Ellis before launching O&D in the UK in mid-2019. It’s been mostly bootstrapped in terms of funding and now has about 10 staff, with plans to grow headcount. It has clients in the UK and US, among them Dechert, Stephenson Harwood, Addleshaw Goddard and Bird & Bird.
Fundamentally, it’s a document platform that works with multiple formats, from simple templates to complex bespoke agreements. It started with a focus on rules-based automation, but now genAI has become part and parcel of the product and what it can do.
Smolkin and team are glad that genAI is around, because tapping LLMs has really helped with a range of tasks on the platform that let lawyers:
- ‘Automate Document Generation: Create suites of documents based on agreed forms, precedents, or your previous work.
- Mass Edits: Make changes across entire suites of diverse documents, such as updating party names, financial figures, or entire clauses.
- Simultaneous Redlining: Redline your entire document suite at once.
- Automatic Renaming: Rename all your files with relevant information automatically.
- Easy Review: Review your colleagues’ work in a table format, reducing potential mistakes.’
‘AI feels like AI now,’ Smolkin told this site, reiterating a view shared by many that at last a technology with the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ label actually appears to behave like something intelligent and is impressively powerful.
‘AI is actionable now, you can ask questions of it,’ Smolkin added. ‘Before, using AI [ i.e. the first wave of NLP / ML ] needed too much plumbing. The barrier was too high.’
So, how has genAI changed things?
‘We remain focused on the core problem of automating repetitive document work. But, AI is accelerating that. For example, it’s a lot faster now for us to set up workflows. You can update key parts of a contract with AI by telling it to change X to Y, and it will set it up,’ he explained.
And this matters because as Smolkin stated: ‘We focus on bulk. You might be updating 10, or even 2,000 documents.’
Smolkin also values the way a lawyer can tell the system what to do in plain language via genAI, without the need for coding, as that ‘expands who can use the platform’. And he adds, it matches his goal to ‘democratise automation’.
And here are some examples of where genAI is helping O&D’s clients now:
- ‘Setting up mass editing workflows based on your documents and a prompt.
- Writing conditional logic and formulas to automate documents.
- Generating data to populate documents,
- Building advanced forms to collect client data or produce documents.’
That said, he doesn’t see genAI as a cure-all, there still needs to be structure and a UI/UX that fits the job. Chat interfaces are good for some things, but not others. You also still need to build logic into the workflows.
The Future
As to the future of the company, which is now five years old, Smolkin sees one where feedback from the clients keeps steering product development. The focus for a while had been on transactional needs, as that was his background. But, O&D is also looking at litigation and employment uses.
There is also work to be done on bulk comparison of documents, and Smolkin can foresee integrating O&D with the capabilities of other companies that share the same ethos.
‘We can be the engine that sits in the middle of a range of connected workflows,’ he concluded, ‘and generative AI will be part of this.’
So, what does all of this show us? For this site, what this tells us is that genAI has not just very rapidly made its way into the legal sector, nor has it only helped new companies come to market, but that it has expanded what existing companies can do in meaningful ways.
In this case, Smolkin is not merely bolting on an AI chatbot to his product to keep up with current trends, instead genAI is now an integral part of ‘the engine’ and allows it to do more and deliver extra value. Its plain language approach also means, as he puts it, that you can ‘democratise automation’ by making it easier to engage with. And that’s a good thing.
One last point. We didn’t talk about genAI ‘agents’, i.e. automated workflows that can act on their own once set up by a user – see the Spellbook launch of Associate last week – but, in many ways O&D is doing something similar, even if the tooling and mechanics is a bit different. Fundamentally, however the process is designed, these approaches are all seeking to do the same thing: absorb process-level labour with genAI supported workflows.
There will certainly be more to come – and genAI will be at the heart of it.